[GILPIN] COAL MINING IN PICTOU COUNTY 177 



steadily. Theso oitcration^;, however, need not be veferi-ed to further, as 

 they are of so recent a date. 



The early records of the coal trade were not accurately kept by tlie 

 Provincial Crown Land Department, but as far as the writer is able to 

 learn, there were extracted between the years 1817 and 1880, in round 

 numbers 6,000,000 tons of coal from the Main and Deep seams. 



A reference may appropriately be niade to the quality of the coal in 

 this great seam which for so many years proved a source of wealth to 

 Pictou county, and to what measvire of success attended the efforts of the 

 lessees to extract coal from it. 



The main seam may be divided in general terms into an upper and a 

 lower bed. Each of these beds is about tAvelve feet in thickness, of work- 

 able coal. The upper divisions in the Store, Bj^e and Foord pits was better 

 in quality than the lower ; accordingly in these pits we find that the upper 

 layer of the top portion won out, and the lower bed proved good enough to 

 be worked conjointly only in the Dalhousie pit. Workings were carried 

 on in the coal to a height of some twenty-four feet, and an inadequate scale 

 of pillarage led to a crush causing the lc)ss of the pit and of an immense 

 amount of coal. A description of the systems of working adopted at 

 these collieries need not be given here, but it may be described as forming 

 a,n immense extent, some four hundred acres, of excavations leaving 

 blocks of coal to support the roof. As each colliery was connected with 

 that i^receding, it became finally a vast burrow, and the fires which 

 occurred from time to time became incapable of isolation or extinction, 

 and remain so to-day at numerous points. 



Eeference has already been made to the fact that in the Store pits 

 the coal was found to deteriorate in the upper part of the seam to the 

 eastward and westward. A similar state of affairs was found to exist in 

 the Bye pit workings. 



The change for the better in the quality of the coal in the Dalhousie 

 l^it, already referred to as sunk beyond this zone of inferior coal super- 

 ficially indicated by the course of Coal Brook, was only comparative. 

 The " fall " or top layer of coal disappeared and the low^er part of the 

 upper portion of the seam was higher in ash than the coal met at the 

 western face of the Bye pit workings This is shown by the following 

 set of analyses from "Acadian Geology" of the three divisions of the 

 tipper part of the seam as worked in the Bye and Dalhousie pits. The 

 first sample is from a point about TOO yards east of the Bye pit, the 

 second from a point about 700 yards west of the Bye pit, and the third 

 from a point about one-half a mile west of the Dalhousie pit : 



